Archimedes
Fire Watcher
For the Plaid pre-production prototype at Laguna, I bet they took a engineering mule and dropped in a drive/suspension unit like below. The drive motors are either Model 3 or like the Model 3 motors. The unibody Chassis was probably not modified a lot, maybe some stiffening. The idea is that minimal changes are done and Tesla is not that far off from production and the real production record no matter how much the dead hose is beat.
But those aren't minimal changes when you're talking about a production car. For example, stiffening the chassis to turn a lap time isn't likely a mod that will make it into a production luxury sedan, due to the trade off in terms of ride comfort. Nor is the widened track with massive wheels and track tires on it. Nor is adding a wing for added down force. None of that is remotely likely to make it onto the next production version of the Model S.
Build the car, produce the car, then race/track the car. Musk says that's a year away, which we all know means sometime in mid 2021. Who knows what else will be on the market by then. Tesla built a one off prototype, threw two seats in the trunk and said 'look our 7 seat family sedan is really fast on the track!' It's classic Musk nonsense. It's still an impressive time for a heavy car, but it's not a production car so it really means nothing at this point.
And, honestly, we're talking about street sedans. A Tesla - Porsche track battle involving large sedans is largely irrelevant given the fact that the current version of these cars are already faster than 99.9% of the likely buyers will ever need or use. They've both already eclipsed the useable performance envelope as a street car.
